I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.

If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)

Book depository is nothing new; there've been outlets selling books internationally via mail order for many decades - the only change is that it's now easier to find and use such services.